Framework Focus: Conversation

Conversation
Process
Value
Inquiry
Authority
Exploration
Communities of scholars, researchers, or professionals engage in sustained discourse with new insights and discoveries occurring over time as a result of varied perspectives and interpretations.

1. Scholarship as Conversation

Key sentence: Developing familiarity with the sources of evidence, methods, and modes of discourse in the field assists novice learners to enter the conversation. New forms of scholarly and research conversations provide more avenues in which a wide variety of individuals may have a voice in the conversation.

Knowledge practices:

  1. cite the contributing work of others in their own information production;
  2. contribute to scholarly conversation at an appropriate level, locally and within the field;
  3. identify barriers to entering scholarly conversation via various venues;
  4. critically evaluate contributions made by others in participatory information environments;
  5. identify the contribution that particular scholarly works make to disciplinary knowledge;
  6. summarize the changes in scholarly perspective over time in a topic or discipline;
  7. recognize that a given scholarly work may not represent the majority perspective.

Dispositions:

  1. recognize they are often entering an ongoing scholarly conversation and not a finished conversation
  2. seek out conversations taking place in their research area
  3. see themselves as contributors to scholarship rather than only consumers of it
  4. recognize that scholarly conversations take place in various venues
  5. suspend judgment on a piece of scholarship’s value until the larger context for the scholarly conversation is better understood
  6. understand the responsibility that comes with entering the conversation through participatory channels
  7. value user-generated content and evaluate contributions made by others
  8. recognize that systems privilege authorities and that not having fluency in a discipline disempowers their ability to participate and engage

We teach:

  • Citation formats for various majors
  • Source evaluation and ways of approaching authority (ENGL 101 and other upper courses)
  • Use of archived prior students' research to build one’s own research (BADM 536, PGM 450, SOCI 251)
  • Notion of scholarly consensus and dissension (CHRS and DIVI courses on Bible)
  • Scopus and citation ranking (EXER 451, various upper courses)
  • Creation of a group annotated bibliography (HONR/MUSC 205)
  • Citation management for scholarly projects (OMED 502 and above, MSBS 544, PA 609)

“Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” Association of College and Research Libraries, 11 Jan. 2016, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. Accessed 21 June 2016.

Download Framework Resources for Librarians.